Exhibition in Berlin – “Evil Flowers”: Decaying Values

Anyone with a green thumb might be tempted to assume that “The Flowers of Evil” (1857) came from Gardener Pötschke. But the volume of poems by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) has precious little to do with allotment gardens. In fact, there are almost no flowers in it; sometimes a rose, sometimes a lily or a daisy (“O pale daisy!”), a buttercup (“the head rests … / on the bedside table like a buttercup”) and, yes, “the fragrant lotus”. Not much for 151 poems. The title is, as we old rhetoricians say, meant “metaphorically.” That’s why the coup to turn an exhibition dedicated to this book into a large flower show is initially nothing more than a joke.

Jokes are, as the poet Konrad Bayer said, “delicacies,” and that also applies to this one. The Berlin Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection exploits the joke to its full potential. Under the direction of Kyllikki Zacharias, it offers more bizarre plants than even the “Dahlia Fire” in the Britzer Garden. There are the “Fleurs du Mal” (1969) by Otto Piene, thirteen black plastic flowers that rise to the height of a man in a storm of strobe lights; »inflatable dolls«, spoken to Roxy Music. There is “Cactus 2” (2023) by Julius von Bismarck, which is reminiscent of a “vagina dentata,” or the injured-looking fruit or capsule by Alexandra Hendrikoff (“SHE,” 2021). There are florally shaped and ornamented vases from the fin-de-siècle or, from the same era, kitsch flowers on glossy pictures (wafers). A field with dried-out cotton plants by Fatoş Irwen (“The Harvest of Time”, 2023) is particularly impressive. The artist has wrapped the hair of her fellow sufferers in Diyarbakir prison around their heads. And the exhibition has even more strange flowers to offer. However, they have nothing to do with Baudelaire.

The exhibition comes closer to the poet when it touches on the second main word of its title: evil. Evil is a category that no longer belongs to our time. Today, the same atrocities are viewed by some as war crimes, by others as a civilizing mission, and by others with a shrug of the shoulders. In Baudelaire’s time, the agreement about what was good and what was evil was just beginning to dissolve. Under the pressure of capitalization and mechanization of all conditions, the old values ​​crumbled and new ones imposed themselves. But, and this is crucial, while the new values ​​were already emerging, the old ones were still partly in force in people’s minds.

It was precisely because he himself was not a modern but a cynical Catholic that Baudelaire was able to portray the emerging modernity. In a new way he grasped the old things that were decaying within her. And he found musty images for this decay: “At the bend of a path, a disgusting carrion / On a bed of scattered pebbles, // Legs in the air like a horny woman, / Fermenting and sweating out poisons.” Anyone who stands in front of Bernard Schultze’s “Great Migof Labyrinth” (1966) automatically thinks of this poem. Decayed-looking figures and vegetal forms irritate and disgust. A finer association with the complex of decay is offered by “Bouncing an Echo” (2003) by the poet and artist Schuldt. The photographs show hands of Chinese mannequins. Its now corpse green paint has peeled off, revealing a reddish plastic. Decay reveals something outrageous, obscene and frightening – that is the meaning of Baudelaire’s “Carrion”.

It was precisely because he himself was not a modern but a cynical Catholic that Baudelaire was able to portray the emerging modernity.

As the old values ​​and characters decay, boundaries that were once strictly observed also decay. Baudelaire’s many erotic allusions are far exceeded by Félicien Rops’ pornographic etchings from the 1880s. Baudelaire is nowhere so drastic, even if he, like the novelist Gustave Flaubert at the same time, was dragged before the court for immorality. In the middle of the 19th century, things that would no longer be noticed today were considered offensive.

Unfortunately, the exhibition does not draw on the basis of the “Flowers”, 26 poems that the 24-year-old poet put under the title “The Lesbians”. In the court-banned poem “Lesbos,” Baudelaire not only imagines the hot kisses of lesbians in love, but also asks: “What do we care about the laws of right and wrong?” And that’s just the point: What was evil yesterday is today indifferent. This insight was revolutionary in the middle of the 19th century, but today it is banal.

It therefore seems a bit forced to bring up images of new evil flowers. You can see the Twin Towers attacked on September 11th, the colorfully glowing coronavirus and images of the Nazi (or Narcissus) Leni Riefenstahl. Is that evil? One could just as easily ask: Is that nice? Because with the evil there was also the beauty. Baudelaire felt this, but only a younger man, Stéphane Mallarmé, put it into verse. Odilon Redon, who later also illustrated Mallarmé’s “Throwing the Dice” (1897), created etchings for the “Flowers of Evil” that are the secret highlight of the show (incidentally, they are easier to study in the recommended catalog than in the original). Redon only hints everywhere, lets many things sink into darkness, blows the characters’ heads apart or burrows them like Samuel Beckett in “Happy Days” (1960). At some point, one suspects, the neon light of modernity will shine over these gloomy landscapes, but this is still only being prepared in a “multifaceted, uninterrupted nightmare.”

»Evil flowers. Baudelaire’s “Fleurs du Mal” and Art” until May 4, 2025 in the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, Schloßstraße 70, Berlin. The catalog was published by Sandstein, Dresden, 176 pages, br., 38 €.

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